• New land, New language

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    37  54%  37%  6mph  windroseWSW bar steep rise  dewpoint22  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon    Holiseason

    Learning how to use a new program is a little like visiting a foreign country, one where you may understand a bit of the language, but not all.  The customs and folk ways of the new country are odd, unfamiliar.  If you don’t follow them, you might get by ok, but you also might find yourself in a world of trouble.

    The program that drives this site is WordPress.  The old website used FrontPage, a Microsoft product.  WordPress is an open source, Linux based program which means anyone can fiddle with the code and it uses Linux, the open source operating system.  All this may seem like babble to you, but it is as if you landed in Rome and tried to read the street signs based on high school Latin.  Sometimes you’ll guess right, sometimes not. 

    Let me give you an example.  I liked the first theme with the Hubble horse-head nebula shot, but I found this moody lake and forest scene and liked it better.  Bill Schmidt had showed me how to upload themes, so I did that, clicked it into use and went on the site to observe my handiwork.  Ooops.  I couldn’t figure out how to get to the admin. page.  Important because that’s where you write posts and manage the overall blog.

    So.  I called Bill.  He got into the admin. pages by clicking on edit.  I could have thought of that, but didn’t.  The folkways of this new land had me bamfoozled.  Bill is the local who knows the language and knows your language, too.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • The Dark Night Comes

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    40  60%  40%  5mph  windrose SSW  bar steep rise  dewpoint 27 Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon  Ordinary Time

    A great wind blows through Andover today.  Literally.  40 mph gusts.  The grass in my window bends to the ground, leaves swirl up from the ground and my shed door, left open yesterday, bangs against the frame.  A change in the weather, air coming from the arctic.

    This is the brown season, a season in which the only garden color is green.   The bleakness corresponds to a certain wildness in my soul and I revel in it.  Lower the lights, crank up the wind, bring on the snow.  Then, then we can get down to it, the travel toward the deep places, the caverns and secret gardens hidden by too much light. 

    This is holiseason, a time when external beauty and easy movement vanish, clearing away a swath of maya, leaving us bare before ourselves.  The Winter Solstice is the well, the sublime and darkest moment.  St John of the Cross gave us the phrase “dark night of the soul.”  He saw the dark night as a place of challenge, of despair and hopelessness, the extinction, or near extinction of faith, salvaged only by re-emergence into the light of faith.  This is one ancient trail.  There is another that sees the dark night as the very place, the site of connection with the sacred depth.  Here in the darkness from which we came and toward which we move our entire life we embrace fecundity, the richness inherent in blackness.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • What is the Great Work?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    54  44%  37%  2mph windroseW  bar steady dewpoint32  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

    Thomas Berry, an ecological visionary and Passionist monk, has written several books concerning the way forward to a healthy planet.  He summarizes his ideas in The Great Work. In this wide ranging, readable book, Berry, a cultural historian, defines a great work.  The Greeks had a great work in applying reason to the natural order.  The Romans had a great work in bringing order to their known world.  The Chinese have a great work that has created a humane and human scale culture.  Native Americans have a great work in their symbiotic relationship with the natural world in which they live.

    Our Great Work, the work of our generation, lies yet before us.  It is this:  create a  relationship between human beings and the planet in which our presence is at least benign and at best a positive good.   I have begun work, in fits and starts, on this, because in the end it has to be each of us, acting in concert, who will call this new world into being. 

    There are many actions we can take, but they need to move beyond recycling and buying green products at the grocery store.  Here a few I’m trying to work into my life:  being a locavore (eating food grown in our region), rationing trips by car and plane, planning for a hybrid car as our next purchase.  In the main though I believe I need to become political again, working on my old issues of economic justice, but this time in a way that will move a double agenda forward, justice for those left behind captialism and rethinking our economic order so that it develops positive signals for ecologically friendly business decisions.  More on this at another point.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Mincing and Adzing

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    56  34%  36%  1mph windroseS  bar steep fall  dewpoint28  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

    In cooking and in outside work I am an optimist.  When I get ready to prepare a meal, I look at the recipes and think, no problem, a cinch.  Only later do I notice that everything has to be minced smaller than a flea and the broth watched every minute for 30 minutes.  When I went outside this morning to dig the firepit, in my mind’s eye I saw the spade cut cleanly into the soil, the pit growing as more and more soil left to level out the surrounding land.  Back inside now I see I might have anticipated the large root structures underlying much of the area I’ve chosen.  But, I didn’t.  Back into the tool shed for the adze.  Cut the root, then pick up the cut end and pull, pull, pull.  Turns out this slows down the process quite a bit and ratchets up the strain on the shoulders and upper back.  Tired.


    📂This entry was posted in Our Land and Home

  • Reservation Frustration

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    51  41% 37%  1mph  windroseS  bar steep fall  dewpoint27  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

    Like most of you, I imagine, I have served as my own travel agent for quite a long while.  Sometimes that’s a good thing, more flexibility, choice; sometimes it’s a bad thing, frustration and headaches.  Getting this Hawai’i trip together for Kate may fall in the latter category.  In her case it means dealing with two providers of Continuuing Medical Education and their pecularities regarding travel and accomodations, then dealing with the pecularities of Allina’s CME regs.   After all that, I have to match my travel to hers, though I’ll leave later and return later.  It will come together.

    Along this line, I’ve become a fan of open table, the online reservation system.  Open table covers a lot of restaurants, all of them I’ve tried of late.  It allows you to check times and availability of reservations without being put on hold and spending a lot of time on the phone.

    Finished the business type stuff for this AM, now I’m headed outside to remove wood from our metal fence for recycling and to dig a fire pit.  Catch you later.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel

  • Growing Up in a Small Town

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33  62%  39%  0mph windroseWSW  bar steep fall  dewpoint21  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon  Ordinary Time 

     “More common sense can be induced by observation of the diversity of human beings in a small town than can be learned in academia.” – Louis B. Wright

    Sherwood Anderson knew the lie in this quote.  Observation of the diversity of human beings in a small town can teach us a great deal, but common sense is not often part of it.  Winesburg, Ohio is a work that sticks in the memory because, like Spoon River Anthology, it knows the individuals in a small town are just that, individuals, no more imbued with common sense, good sense, or evil, for that matter, than folks in any other place.  This quote comes from the following book:  Barefoot in Arcadia, University of South Carolina.  Might explain the naivete.  Or, it might not.

    I succeeded in marrying the endurance program of Core Performance with the resistance work.  Felt good and will prove manageable.

    Getting that get down to work feeling again.  The last week or so have seen me immersed in productive activity, but not on point when it comes to writing new stuff.  Got waylaid on the marketing/distribution work, so I have to get back to that, but I want to work outside some tomorrow, get started on the firepit.  Nice to have choices and good work to choose.


    📂This entry was posted in General

  • Diffusion or Delusion?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  28%  40%  0mph  windroseWSW  dewpoint 20  bar falls Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon  Ordinary Time

    Sheila lectured this morning on divination and origin stories among African nations.  The morning felt long.  Maybe it was me; maybe it was a conflict I keep having bewteen the art historical approach and the anthropological.  In art history the appearance of similarity is often taken as evidence of diffusion, that is, one culture influences another.  In fact, diffusion often does not explain similarities.  A classic example is pyramid forms in Mayan cities.  Early antiquarians felt the pronounced similarities with Egyptian pyramids sealed a  relationship.  They did not, however, explain how Egyptians got to Central America or the Central Americans got to Egypty.  No contact, no diffusion.  Even though Thor Heyerdahl showed that trans-oceanic travel could occur given simple technologies, that is not the same as providing evidence that it happened.  The anthropological approach demands broader evidence than stylistic simliarity or similarity between one set of stories and another. Why?  Because, as humans, we often follow similar paths to problem solving–you might call them AncienTrails.

    After, I wandered the galleries, always happy to have the museum to myself.  Ran into John, a guard, whose father has some industrial design work on display in the Don Harley exhibition.  Since I’m assigned to the Modern Design galleries for a SuperValu event this Wednesday, I’ll show off his Dad’s work which includes a plastic flyswatter, a metal flask and plastic ribbon dispensers.  All high concept design.

    The other project was a magic of myth tour I’ve got coming up on Sunday.  This one wants Roman and Greek mythology.  A lot more objects than I’d thought.  I wrote them down and will do some research, consider a theme.

    The museum speaks to me.  When I’m alone there, the art begins to accumulate, put layers on my heart.  Later, perhaps days or months later, my heart will work through what I learned.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture

  • Isolation, Volcanoes and Perfume

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    44  69%  40%  0mph windrose N  bar steep rise  Ordinary Time Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon 

    In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
      – Andre Maurois

    Even though the trip is three months away, the travel bug has begun to gnaw at my attention, drawing me toward the Pacific and that peculiar place neither fully Asian nor fully Western nor fully Polynesian, Hawai’i. 

    When Kate first suggested going to Hawai’i back in 1992, I said no.  “There are a lot of places I want to see before beaches and surfboards.”

    She persuaded me. 

     The islands had me at the fragrance of wet soil, evident even when walking on the skyway from the plane to the terminal on Honolulu. It was so pungent, redolent of sailing ships and Buddhas, navigating by the waves and stars.  Then, the flowers and the perfume of gardenia and jasmine thick even at highway speeds.  Blues, so many blues, from cerulean to sky to turquoise.  Greens in even more shades.  Greens that climb the mountains, dive into the ocean, and all that wasted green on the golf courses.   Most powerful, and I do not sun bathe, the scent of coconut oil and warmed human flesh.  Whenever I smell coconut oil, I’m plunged back into the sweetness.

    Each time I’ve gone since that first trip I’ve had a theme, something I wanted to pursue in more depth.  One trip it was the isolation.  Look at the map.  Hawai’i is as far away from the continental experience as you can get on terra firma.  One evening I sat on the beach on Kauai, listening to the waves crash against the shore.  Brilliant pieces of glass sparkled in the black sky.  All at once the time between the waves became prominent, a silence, a caesura.  The isolation of the islands dwelt in that silence. 

    Another time I investigated volcanoes.  We stayed at Volcano House on the rim of Kilauea.  I spent a week hiking Kilauea and Mauna Loa.  We managed to be there during a six week cessation in an eruption which has been otherwise consistent since 1983 and which picked up the week after we left.  Even so, I hiked out on the lava field from the Puu ‘O ‘O eruptions.  Hiking on lava is difficult; it is sharp, jagged and unsmoothed by erosion.  When I got out of sight of the visitor area, which took over an hour, it was as if I had landed on an alien world.  There were no plants, no buildings, no roads, no signs of life.  All I could feel was the occasional heat from lava coursing through lava tubes beneath my feet.

    Not sure right now what I want to have for a focus, maybe just r&r.  Write, relax, hike, eat fish and papaya.  Something will probably come to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel

  • A Moving Sunday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  70%  39%  4mph windroseNNW  dewpoint 37   bar steady Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon (I hope.)

    Kate and I plan to move items around in the living room and kitchen today, putting some of the finishing touches on our remodeling.  Her cold has abated, so her energy is fearsome.  She’ll work me hard, at least until 11:30 when the Vikes and Packers come on the tv.

    Jon asked Kate to help him redesign their kitchen for an addition he and Jen plan.  With two little ones they’ll need more crawl space.  Jen has also considered becoming a day care provider, which, with her early elementary experience, would be a great fit.

    All for now, because a work load is calling me.


    📂This entry was posted in General